Senate Democrats and Republicans on the Veterans Affairs committees have joined hands to scold the administration over missed deadlines and restrictive language drafted for implementing new benefits for caregivers of veterans who were severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an unusual le
tter Tuesday to President Barack Obama, signed by both chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate committees, the Veterans Administration is criticized for missing a Jan. 30 deadline for full implementation of the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2010.
The letter also charges that the VA intends to limit the number of caregivers eligible for a monthly stipend and other new benefits by adding “arbitrary and stringent criteria” that Congress never meant to impose.
It’s a rare misstep for an administration that conspicuously has polished its image of support for veterans, service members and their families.
The president signed the caregiver bill last May with families of severely injured veterans at his side. Yet some of those caregivers will be ineligible for the new benefits if the VA’s interpretation of the law is allowed to stand, say committee leaders and advocacy groups.
The letter asks Obama to direct the VA and the Office of Management and Budget to make new regulations effective within 60 days and to ensure that they comply with eligibility criteria Congress set in law.
The monthly stipend is to be paid to caregivers of severely injured veterans whose disabling conditions occurred or were aggravated in the line of duty on or after Sept. 11, 2001. Eligible veterans include those with traumatic brain injury, psychological trauma and other mental disorders.
The law further defines eligible vets as those needing personal care services because they can’t perform one or more independent activities of daily living or they require supervision as a result of neurological or other impairments.
The Veterans Administration’s draft plan, however, adds criteria including a finding by the VA that “without caregiver support providing personal care services at home in an ongoing manner,” the eligible veteran “would require hospitalization, or nursing home or other institutional care.”
Caregivers and wounded warriors advocates say this change alone would pare the eligible veteran population from several thousand veterans to fewer than 1,000.
There is a lot at stake here.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the new Senate committee chairwoman, grilled VA Secretary Eric Shinseki last week on his department’s failure to meet deadlines and for proposing to restrict eligibility.
VA’s implementation, she said, “hardly resembled the bill that unanimously cleared this Congress.”
One veteran and spouse excluded, Murray said, would be retired Army Sgt. Ted Wade and his wife, Sarah. He lost an arm and suffered traumatic brain injury in Iraq in 2004, which forced Sarah Wade to quit her job to care of him and fight through mounds of red tape. The Wades became leaders in advocating for the caregiver bill and stood beside Obama as he signed it into law.
Now they and “a lot of other veterans and caregivers from across the country … fall outside this new line in the sand the VA has drawn, or have been left in limbo and now don’t know if this benefit they advocated and worked so hard for will support them,” Murray said.
Shinseki responded by listing a host of benefits the VA already provides to caregivers “including education, training, homemaker home health services, respite care (and) family support services.”
He promises the new benefits will start by summer. Meanwhile, he added, “we are absolutely open to suggestions for different places to draw that line than what we have put forward.”
The plan Murray critiqued is a “start place,” he added.
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